LeBron James is currently a free agent, and despite the mountains of speculation piling up around him, it’s hard to imagine anyone really knows what he’s going to do. That might even apply to him. The reporting thus far has indicated that he has welcomed pitches from teams around the league. While a few expected favorites have emerged, enough teams seem to believe that they have a realistic chance of signing him that it’s reasonable to assume he’s going into this process with an open mind.
So what is he looking for? When James decided to return for a 24th season, a source familiar with James’ thinking told ESPN that he wanted to play “meaningful, competitive basketball.” We can assume, for the sake of argument, that this rules out noncompetitive teams. Being able to win should therefore be treated as table stakes. But what does a team need beyond that?
The guiding principle, according to virtually everyone involved and reporting on the matters, is happiness. Only James truly knows what happiness means for him. His agent, Rich Paul, recently gave some insight into what that means on his “Game Over” podcast with Max Kellerman.
“This is the first time that LeBron James is making a decision pressure-free,” Paul said. “He’s won already. He’s made good on his promise — he won in L.A. This is strictly for his happiness. What does happiness entail? It’s a number of things. It’s a bucket of happiness. It’s basketball, it’s living, it’s camaraderie, it’s competition. It’s everything.”
How James is going to weigh all of those factors, only he knows. If it’s as simple as picking the team likeliest to win a championship, he’ll hop onto one of the favorites. If where he lives matters most, well, Cleveland probably has the advantage. If he wants ideal golfing conditions, it’s probably Miami. We don’t know if there are deal-breakers here. If he needs a certain-sized city, or a certain type of weather, or a certain set of existing personal connections, the field may be whittled down to only a few contenders.
But if he’s willing to truly keep an open mind, I think the answer here is obvious. I think LeBron James should play for the Minnesota Timberwolves. Here’s my pitch:
The basketball fit
LeBron has a bit of a Goldilocks problem here. He can almost certainly win next season’s championship if he decides he’s just going to play for the best team that will have him. While teams like the Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks do not appear to be in open pursuit, it’s hard to imagine any of them would turn him away if he called and said he wanted to play for them.
But think about the idea of “meaningful” basketball. Would it really mean anything if James went to an established favorite and won a preordained championship as essentially a role player? Probably not. He doesn’t want to get branded as a ring-chaser. He’s probably not looking to take the easy way.
Now, he could go to a lesser team and try to raise it up, but the problem he’d encounter in most destinations is that the Thunder, the Spurs and the Knicks are so far ahead of the field that he would realistically struggle to actually compete with them almost anywhere else.
If he joins the Golden State Warriors, barring some stunning blockbuster we can’t foresee, he’d be joining the bones of last year’s Western Conference No. 10 seed. As glitzy as the names would be, the NBA isn’t designed for teams that old anymore. They’d never survive the 82-game regular-season grind. The Cleveland Cavaliers were not a LeBron James away from beating the Knicks in last year’s Eastern Conference Finals, and that was with Dean Wade and Keon Ellis, who have both since left. Who’s defending the ball for that version of the Cavaliers? He wouldn’t be playing “meaningful” basketball for a team with no championship equity.
So we’re looking for a middle ground here: not too good to make a championship easy, not too mediocre to make a championship impossible. Again, I’m going to keep coming back to the idea of “meaningful.” The most meaningful sort of team LeBron James could join would be one that is not capable of winning a championship without him, but would be right in the thick of the race with him.
That describes the Timberwolves. They’ve become the Western Conference’s perpetual bridesmaids, losing to the eventual conference champion three postseasons in a row. The biggest reason for their defeats in all three series was a lack of secondary scoring and shot-creation outside of Anthony Edwards. Karl-Anthony Towns shot 28% from the floor in the first three games of the 2024 Western Conference Finals. Minnesota lost those three games by 13 total points, and they’re probably a big reason the Timberwolves traded him. Julius Randle no-showed the Oklahoma City series two years ago and the San Antonio battle this year. The Spurs in particular were able to double Edwards relentlessly because no one else on the team could punish them for it.
Minnesota traded for LaMelo Ball to address that problem, but remember, he has no real playoff experience and has mostly been terrible in his brief Play-In appearances. The Timberwolves need a steadier hand, especially now that Mike Conley plays for the Boston Celtics.
Adding James would obviously provide one, and the pairing of James and Ball would address by far Minnesota’s biggest offensive flaw over the past few years: its lack of passing. That flaw isn’t for lack of trying. The Timberwolves have ranked seventh, 11th and eighth in passes per game over the past three seasons. Those passes are just fairly aimless. Despite ranking seventh in total passes last season, only the Clippers averaged fewer potential assists per game. It should not be possible to rank seventh in one of those stats and tie for 28th in the other. It happened. Edwards may be a primary ball-handler, but he is not a point guard. Put Ball and James into the mix and he’ll never have to be. That’s 48 minutes of elite playmaking every night.
Removing any sort of playmaking burden from Edwards’ shoulders is only going to make him more lethal everywhere else, and frankly, that was his last notable weakness to begin with. Edwards came into the NBA capable of generating elite rim-pressure. He added an elite 3-point shot over the past several years. Last season, his post-game and mid-range shooting improved dramatically. He’s an elite three-level scorer now, much like Kyrie Irving was next to James in Cleveland. That partnership was so symbiotic because Irving is at his best when he isn’t tasked with point guard-level playmaking responsibilities. James took those off his shoulders and he soared.
Edwards would offensively. He also would defensively. Edwards is capable of great defense. Late in close playoff games, he dials up the effort. He’s asked to do too much offensively every night to sustain that effort for 48 minutes. The less he needs the ball, the more effort he can pour into defense. Fortunately, Minnesota doesn’t need much. Rudy Gobert earned yet another All-Defense selection last season and Jaden McDaniels easily could have. The Timberwolves have an elite rim-protector and they have two potentially elite perimeter defenders. They’ll have to hide Ball, and James can’t take high-leverage matchups for full games anymore, but he is still a genius off-ball defender who can function well in a smaller role and also dial things up for bigger possessions when needed. There’s a real balance here. This version of the Timberwolves would have a chance to be the best offense in the NBA, but still near the top of the league in defense.
Even the starting lineup just makes sense. An All-Star in Ball. An All-Star in Edwards. An ascending two-way star in McDaniels. An All-Star in Gobert. And a LeBron James-shaped hole at power forward. There is not a lineup in all of basketball into which he slides more cleanly. There is not a group of players in the league he would more easily enhance.
James is maybe the greatest hit-ahead transition passer in NBA history. There aren’t many guards in basketball who run the court like Ayo Dosunmu, so James would get him plenty of free buckets on the break. Gobert needs someone to throw him lobs. James just spent five years and change throwing them to Anthony Davis. Once Edwards and Ball find the pick-and-roll chemistry with James that Irving had, blitzing them off of his screens to take away their pull-up jumper becomes effectively impossible. Oh, you’re going to give LeBron James a 4-on-3? Good luck with that.
When Tim Connelly was tasked with upending the Western Conference’s last proto-dynasty, he built a gigantic, defense-first roster to effectively Denver-proof his roster. That group did indeed torture the Nuggets, but the Thunder and the Spurs are the class of the West now. Connelly knew his jumbo-sized front court would no longer cut it. He couldn’t beat the Thunder or Spurs at their own game, so he went the other way and tilted the roster towards defense. James would be the best of both worlds, giving the Timberwolves one of the NBA’s best and most diverse collections of scoring threats while still filling the enormous power forward hole Randle and Naz Reid left behind. This is the right sort of team with the right sort of roster to maximize James at this stage of his career. They have more than enough support to keep him fresh through the regular season, but still need him to scale up his duties when it counts most in the playoffs. This is where LeBron James can play “meaningful” basketball.
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